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Where are you on the Fastidiousness Scale?

Sometimes statisticians just have to let go, and accept that some statistical analysis will be done in less than ideal conditions, with fairly dodgy data and more than a few violated assumptions. Sometimes the wrong graph will be used. Sometimes people will claim causation from association. Just as sometimes people put apostrophes where they should not and misuse the word “comprise”.

When we are teaching, particularly non-majors, we need to think hard about where we sit on the fastidiousness scale. (In my experience just about all statistics teaching is to non-majors, which may say something about the attitudes of people to statistics.)

The fastidiousness scale is best described by its two extremes. At one extreme statistical analysis is performed only by mathematical statisticians, using tools like SAS and R, but only if they know exactly how each formula works (and have preferably proved…